Books and Arts Archives

Sunday

June 18, 2023

Lady Caroline Lamb and the frantic bed-hopping between the great houses of England

“Mad, bad and dangerous to know.” That’s the line Lady Caroline Lamb (1785-1828) is known for — her brilliant, pithy verdict on her lover Lord Byron. Her other great claim to fame — her marriage to Viscount Melbourne, twice prime minister — was marginal from a historical point of view: she died, aged only forty-two, her health shattered by drink and laudanum, before Melbourne became PM; before he became Lord Melbourne, in fact — he succeeded to the title after her death. But, still, as Lady Antonia Fraser reveals in her gripping biography, Lady Caroline Lamb: A Free Spirit, she was a remarkable woman, possessed of exceptional charm, as was Byron.

Margaret Mitchell

Lorrie Moore explores the thin veil between life and death

Very few of us could evade accusations of pretension if we quoted Faulkner in everyday conversation. The characters conjured up in Lorrie Moore’s fiction are granted an exception, though not always solely by virtue of their earnestness. In her novel I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home, which traces a journey toward a final burial in the American South, allusion to As I Lay Dying is particularly apt. Moore has made a name for herself as one of America’s masters of the short story, with her inimitable style on display ever since her first work of fiction, “Raspberries,” was published in 1977. In this, her first novel for fourteen years, she once again wields her wordplay playfully and powerfully, striking a balance between levity and gravity.

Christopher Sandford

The troubled relationship between Mussolini and his son-in-law

Like those of his wartime ally Joseph Goebbels, the diaries of the Italian fascist foreign minister Count Galeazzo Ciano (1903-44) have proved a mainstay of academic research into the frequently banal inner workings of the Axis dictatorships. Both men were entirely aware of their journals’ historical and commercial value. In 1937, Goebbels struck a lucrative deal with Max Amman, the Nazi Party publisher, for the release of his warped musings on race and politics twenty years after his death, which in the event came sooner than he might have imagined. Ciano in turn used his diaries to barter unsuccessfully for his life when arrested on charges of treason.

Philip Womack

Men at War examines homosexuality among World War Two soldiers

As a little boy, Luke Turner, like so many other little boys, was fascinated by World War Two. He used to spend hours carefully making Airfix models of warplanes, and his favorite haunt was the Royal Air Force Museum in Hendon, a suburb of North London. Men at War, his second book, is an attempt to explore and explain both this interest and his own sexuality (he is bisexual, with a female partner), in response to what he sees as the dominant, jingoistic attitude propagated via general British cultural discourse. He claims that we do not see those who fought as individuals, but as clipped, heroic avatars, like Captain Sir Tom Moore, who raised millions of pounds for NHS charities during the lockdowns: dignified, silent, brave.

Mitchell Jackson

The history of a Britney Spears masterpiece

The year was 2007. The Bush administration was launching bombs in the Middle East, the economy was collapsing and pop songstress Britney Spears was standing in a recording booth at Sony’s New York City office. As Spears waited to lay down vocals, producers Ezekiel Lewis and Christian “Bloodshy” Karlsson discussed the latter’s condo in Bangkok, Thailand. “Oh, Thailand,” Spears said, according to Lewis’s recollection. “Why don’t we go and do the songs in Thailand? Let’s go to Thailand. I have the plane coming tonight.” Lewis looked across the studio at Karlsson and mouthed, “What the fuck? Is she serious?” She was dead serious. “Well, why don’t we get this one down first, and then maybe let’s think about it tomorrow?” he said.

Robert S. Erickson

Taking in Good Night, Oscar and New York, New York

Mental illness is horrifying and hilarious, like politics or killer clowns. And unlike those two subjects, it can be staged without tackiness or gimmicks. King Lear’s all the more tragic for losing his marbles and out-fooling the Fool. I was nevertheless surprised to see a show exploit the premise as heartily as Good Night, Oscar does, for laughs and gasps alike. The new play about the mid-century pianist, actor, comedian, and all-around firecracker Oscar Levant gets more mileage out of old-school “mental-health struggles” — alcoholism, drug addiction, schizophrenia, OCD, wifebeating, electroshock therapy — in a taut hundred minutes than Dr. Phil could in a whole season.

William Newton

What the Old Masters can teach us about contemporary life

The seventeenth-century Dutch painter Johannes Vermeer is certainly having a moment, thanks to the enormous popularity of the retrospective of his work that concluded at the Rijksmuseum in June. Demand to see the gathering-together of twenty-eight of the thirty-seven currently known paintings by the Old Master far outstripped supply; the show sold out within two days of opening, and scalpers were allegedly reselling tickets online for hundreds, even thousands, of dollars. It’s certainly not difficult to understand why people would flock to see Vermeer’s work, thanks to his beautiful brushwork and sensitively lit compositions.

Francesca Peacock

The surreal life of Leonora Carrington

"It’s the belief that nothing is ordinary, that everything in life is extraordinary. And being old is no more, no less, extraordinary than being young.” When the artist and writer Leonora Carrington was asked in 2006 what “Surrealism” meant to her, this was her reply. It was a remarkably frank statement from an artist who had, at other points in her career, declared that she “was never a Surrealist,” even memorably asserting that the Surrealist link between women (the femme-enfant) and the muse was “bullshit.” Perhaps it owes its frankness to the interviewer: sitting across the kitchen in Carrington’s house in Mexico City was her cousin, the journalist and author Joanna Moorhead.

Mary Kate Skehan

Heidi Swanson, the whole food revolutionary

Heidi Swanson started her vegetarian food blog, 101 Cookbooks, in 2003. At the time, the Atkins Diet was sweeping the nation, even as schoolchildren still learned the carb-heavy Food Pyramid. It would take another year for a landmark study to link high-fructose corn syrup to the obesity epidemic, and another fifteen for the FDA to ban trans fats. Back then, granola was for tree-huggers, like organic produce, Whole Foods Markets and the Pacific Northwest. Times have changed. These days, everyone outside the Lion Diet community agrees that a plant-based diet is best, preferably free of hormones and artificial sweeteners. 101 Cookbooks is still active and popular, if less countercultural than at its inception.

Sunday

May 21, 2023

Jenna Stocker

The dauntless spirit of Richard Halliburton

A sailor; a conqueror of the most treacherous mountain peaks; a man who wades defiantly under the stars of the Far East sky; a dashing writer who pursues his mark as a hunter on safari; an explorer who rides elephants through the Alps. This is not a collection of young men, newly emancipated by the end of the Great War and a new era of global empires. It is the nearly improbable life of one man, Richard Halliburton, whose swashbuckling existence was inspired by everyone from Daniel Defoe and Rupert Brooke to Odysseus. Halliburton was the self-proclaimed protagonist of his own heroic epic. He decided in the days before his graduation from Princeton in spring 1921 that he would forgo a life of tedious expectations and “let those who wish have their respectability.

Christopher Sandford

The king and queen who saved the British monarchy

In some ways, the world of George VI and his consort Elizabeth, the future Queen Mother, from 1936-52 was very different from how we envision that of today’s British royal family; its rituals seem to belong to an era of Jurassic antiquity. In George’s day, Britain was still a global power, and its monarch ruled over both an empire and an elaborate court system with a “Page of the Backstairs” and a “Yeoman of the Pantry” — not to mention a fully staffed, oceangoing yacht — at his disposal. His coronation in May 1937 was as protracted as that of any maharajah. The Edwardian braid and sashes on display during more recent military pageantry look sadly Ruritanian by comparison. In other ways, their lives resonate more clearly with our own.

Fred Sculthorp

How refugees saved a town in upstate New York

Utica was once home to the American Nightmare. In the 1960s, the upstate New York city was a vibrant manufacturing hub, home to 100,000 people. Then the great unwinding began. General Electric pulled out in the early 1990s, and shortly after that the Air Force base closed. Entire streets burned as fleeing residents tried to claim insurance payouts. Families moved out as gangs from New York City moved in. Walking through the rubble in 1999, the mayor joked to an interviewer he had been having a nightmare of his own: “I dreamed I was the mayor of the city of Utica.

Katrina Gulliver

Inside the world of multilevel marketing

Emily Paulson felt lost. A young mother with several small children, she’d stepped away from the career ladder and found herself stuck juggling childcare alone when her husband traveled for his corporate job. She was trapped in a circuit of sweatpants and Spongebob. So when an old high school acquaintance invited her out for wine, she was thrilled at the chance to get dressed up, go somewhere swish and feel like herself again. It turned out to be a trap. Although she wasn’t swept into the back of a van by kidnappers, she was propelled into the world of Multilevel Marketing (MLM), also known as a pyramid scheme. The drinks invitation was a lure, first to be wowed by the fabulous cosmetics she could buy (at a discount!! And didn’t her friend’s skin look amazing?

Philip Womack

Tom Hanks should stick to acting

The French novelist Michel Houellebecq recently appeared in a pornographic film. As one does, of course, although he claims that it was by accident. Nevertheless, there aren’t many authors-turned-actors, even by design. (Graham Greene had a small cameo in Truffaut’s Day for Night; Maya Angelou pops up dispensing folksy wisdom in How to Make an American Quilt.) You will, however, lose count of the thespians who clamor to adorn the printed page; I will not mention any, but you can look them up, should you wish to. Tom Hanks (the actor) has produced his debut novel, The Making of Another Major Motion Picture Masterpiece. The title is, I think, supposed to be arch, in a David Eggers, Heartbreaking-Work-of-Staggering-Genius kind of way.

Alexander Larman

Where will the vogue for censoring our best-loved authors lead?

It was recently announced in the Daily Telegraph that the novels of P.G. Wodehouse — much beloved by millions, including me, for their combination of wit and soufflé-light evocation of an England that never really existed but which almost might have done — are the latest to fall foul of that new scourge of writers the world over, the “sensitivity reader.” New editions of Wodehouse’s masterly works Right Ho, Jeeves and Thank You, Jeeves have been reissued with the craven disclaimer “Please be aware that this book was published in the 1930s, and contains language, themes and characterizations which you may find outdated. In the present edition, we have sought to edit, minimally, words that we regard as unacceptable to present-day readers.

Robert S. Erickson

Bringing back Stephen Sondheim and enduring a new Andrew Lloyd Webber

On Sunday April 16, the curtain went down on Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Phantom of the Opera for the last of 13,981 performances on Broadway, a titanic thirty-five-year run grossing north of $1.3 billion. The end of an era? Not quite — dating back to the 1979 opening of Evita, Lloyd Webber musicals have run continuously on the Great White Way for forty-four years. That streak is now hitched to the fortunes of Bad Cinderella, which opened just weeks before Phantom closed. The show gets a lift from a lush score and some winning numbers, as well as sumptuous set design. The whole premise, however, turns out to be a pumpkin, and it may spell midnight for the composer’s magical run within the year.

Mitchell Jackson

How Madonna turned pop culture Catholic

Madonna Louise Veronica Ciccone is embarking on her first greatest-hits tour, but she has forgotten why she was great. In her announcement video for the Celebration Tour, celebrating the fortieth anniversary of Madonna’s self-titled debut, the queen of pop and a random assortment of B-list celebrities — Jack Black, Amy Schumer, Diplo and Meg Stalter, to name a few — reminisced about the queen of pop fellating an Evian bottle in her documentary Truth or Dare. A few days later, Madonna introduced Sam Smith’s and Kim Petras’s striptease at the Grammys. “Are you ready for a little controversy?” Madonna screamed at the crowd, holding a dominatrix cane in the air. The audience was too bored to respond.

Francesca Peacock

What makes Berthe Morisot’s nudes so unique?

In the years before the French Revolution saw heads roll down the boulevards, revolutionaries murdered in the bath, and endless numbers of fluffy lap dogs forced to fend for themselves after their mamans met their untimely ends, one art critic made his name with his fearless criticism of Paris’s annual art exhibition, the “Salon.” The prominent style in mid- and late-eighteenth century France was Rococo — think impossibly ornate, gold-swirled furniture; paintings of pink, fluffy nymphs in gilt-edged, asymmetrical frames; and portraits of women in dresses so large, and so embellished, that they resemble iced wedding cakes more than human beings. In the face of endless walls of this style of art, the critic Denis Diderot was caustic.

William Newton

What museums can learn from contemporary technology

"I grew up wanting to be an astronaut,” Robert Stein, the National Gallery of Art’s recently appointed chief information officer, tells me. “I studied electrical engineering, and I got a job doing high-performance computing. And then one day, I did a project with an art museum, and I thought, ‘Wait a second, this is an area of the world that needs more technology in order to connect more people together.’ And the rest was kind of downhill from there.” The National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC — the NGA — is now ranked the most popular art museum in America.

Thursday

April 20, 2023

David J. Garrow

Who was the real Martin Luther King, Jr.?

Jonathan Eig’s new King: A Life (KAL) is the first comprehensive biography of the black civil rights hero to appear in more than thirty years, and it will succeed my own Bearing the Cross (BTC), published in 1986, as the standard account. One normally does not review a book one’s blurbed — I’ve called it “a great leap forward in our biographical understanding” — nor where one’s actively aided the author’s research and read his manuscript multiple times. But comparisons between KAL and BTC will be legion, so highlighting the three most significant ways in which the two biographies differ will be a service both to the thousands of readers whom Eig’s volume should attract and to students of King’s life more generally.